Stress and Simplification

For many animals (and even plants) in nature, a life ending attack can come from any angle at any time. Many songbirds, for example, keep their head on a swivel even when they're in a relatively safe spot. They nervously look around for signs of predators all the time and fly away at the slightest provocation. Much of their time is spent looking for food, eating, or trying not to be eaten. (But not all of it, here's a video of a crow sledding down a roof.)

For most people, life's pretty tame. In most places and most times, there aren't any predators, except potentially other people, and our stressors are mostly social--job stress, relationship stress, or just low level social stress that comes from being around other people and keeping up appearances. A few, for example Richard Proenneke, have even opted to live in the wilderness rather than deal with civilization and other people. For most, there's a vague urge, or dream for the nonsense of civilization to be swept away so we can be free.

Lush, flourishing nature, even in the tame environment of a place like Northeast Ohio can be overwhelming. The mind of a man is incapable of perceiving her in all her complexity. Cities and towns, and even private homes and farms are the solution to this. People remove themselves from nature by eliminating her complexity by planting lawns and removing habitats and other predators, or by paving her over entirely. Dominion over nature is really removal from nature.

It's really striking how differently native people in the USA solved these problems before European settlers arrived. They had a pretty low-impact set of solutions, maybe necessitated by a lack of literal horsepower and steel, and by a completely different set of gods.